2. Reconstruction Anyone know anything about it?
Post Civil War, the South was a mess.
Lincoln’s dead.
Freed slaves have little money or opportunities.
And, basically, most southerners don’t trust the federal government and are sort of mad.
Reconstruction was the name given to the federal government’s attempt to rebuild the South.

3. Regionalism Writers reacted to Reconstruction.
Decided they did not want to see their regional customs absorbed by a national country.
Sought to capture the customs, character and landscapes of distinct regions in the country.

4. Diction We’ve talked about diction before as word choice.
Now it’s time to talk about it as the way people talk.
So let me ask you:
Soda, coke or pop? Soft drink???

6. Regionalism and realism
Local color writers.
Writers like Twain who tried to capture the local, unique character of their areas.
Emphasized every day experience.
Portrayed that with accuracy.
So a lot like realism.

7. Naturalism Essential Questions: Do humans act like animals?
Do we respond to instinct?
Responding to the issues of Social Darwinism.

8. Characteristics of Naturalism
1.Man vs. Nature: survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes.
2. The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."
3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."
4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.
5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.